Rubio attacked the Chinese for doing exactly what Dear Leader has done here in the United States in response to the pandemic, and the only mention of Trump's name was to praise him for his too little, too late partial travel ban.
March 23, 2020

As we've already discussed here, the right and Republicans have been looking for anyone to scapegoat over the spread of the coronavirus other than Dear Leader Trump, and the viewers were treated to yet another example of that on this weekend's Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Rubio was asked by Bartiromo about the timeline of the Chinese response to the virus, and was more than happy to pile on in attacking them for making this worse, which they have, but was unwilling to utter a single word criticizing Trump for his weeks of denying the pandemic and its severity, delaying testing, calling it a "Democratic hoax," and some sort of evil plot designed to keep him from being reelected.

BARTIROMO: Let me take you to really the timeline that we have in terms of when this first started. One of the issues that we keep talking about is the fact that had we known what was happening sooner, maybe we could have had a better handle on things. This timeline of the China coronavirus campaign, where we continue to see disinformation campaign.

They knew about this back in December, but still sent this big delegation to the White House to shake everybody's hand to do the Phase I China deal. Then they sent the largest delegation ever to Davos.

What's your take on what we are hearing coming out of China right now and their disinformation campaign and how do we deal with that?

RUBIO: Well, my first take is the the entire planet, every government on earth in every country is badly prepared for this sort of pandemic that were seeing right now, and frankly it's very bad as it is, but it could've been far deadly and far worse. If this is anything like the Spanish flu in terms of mortality we'd be in tremendous amount of trouble.

The Chinese made that far worse because the way you respond to something like that and a global event of that magnitude is, you immediately declare it to the world, bring in all of the experts and you start working, and you try to contain it to a place where it starts. You try to keep it from leaving there and getting to other places.

And instead what Chinese authorities were interested in was their image, they didn't want to look bad. They didn't want to look like they had a problem, and so they covered it up and they punished the people who actually spoke about this openly. And they weren't open to researchers. They didn't share the original virus, or they didn't even disclose human to human transmission until very late in December. And everybody really lost four to six weeks here in responding. We could've been four to six weeks ahead of this had they been more transparent.

That doesn't dissolve us missteps that we've made or people in Europe have made, or someone else has me, but I can tell you it was made tremendously, much harder by not only did the Chinese not disclose it, they bullied a bunch of countries into not cutting off flights, and so these cases got into other countries as well because they didn't do what president Trump did here.

If Bartiromo were an actual reporter instead of a propagandist on the equivalent of state-run TV, this is the timeline she would have been asking Rubio about instead.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon